Write or Die

I woke up mediocre again. Which is to say, I woke up unfinished with a human-trashed, burned-out face, thoughts leaking like cheap ink, staining everything I try to hold still. Checked the phone, no missed calls, no name lighting up the half-splitted screen, no urgency stitched into my nerves in the morning. The air static, thick, unbothered and indifferent, as if it had forgotten I exist. My phone is a dead object, a silent accomplice. No one is reaching out. I am left staring into the slow dissociation of my own interior. The pillowcase beneath my face is twisted into these small geological disasters, craters, folds, still damp from a night of restless drifting, like I've been wrestling with ghosts all night, or maybe versions of myself that refused to settle. I stay in bed longer than I should, staring into nothingness, letting thoughts ooze in and out without structure. No responsibility, no external rhythm to borrow, just this raw, unfiltered confrontation with being alive, and the quiet suspicion that if I don't move soon, I might dissolve completely into the mattress, into the “new day”.

I sense the light leaking through, slowly at first, then violently. It cuts through the window, bouncing off the neighbour's glass like some cheap divine trick, straight into my eyes, no warning. I don't flinch. I just let it happen. I let it flood my vision until it fractures, until everything becomes this white, humming void where outlines fade and die in the light. My thoughts start looping, dumb and heavy: this is it, this is something, no it's nothing, no it's everything disguised as nothing, and I can't tell if I'm thinking or just echoing some broken internal tape. The light burns the edges of me, my name, my plans, the idea that I'm supposed to be someone today, and for a second, or maybe longer, I slip into this blank, glowing stupidity where meaning collapses under its own weight. I'm not even analysing anymore, just circling… create, move, breathe, transform, repeat, repeat, repeat. Just a bunch of words losing texture, becoming sounds and static. And somewhere inside the glare, I feel this almost embarrassing urge to exist without justification, to just make things, ruin things, become something else and then undo it again. But the loop tightens. Why create? Why move? Why breathe? It doesn't resolve, it just keeps spinning until it starts to hurt, like I'm chewing on my own consciousness, dulling it down, flattening it, killing it just to see if something quieter, something truer survives underneath.

There's this lie we keep dressing up in silk scarves and bullshit gallery lighting made by some guy working for the manager, saying "an artist dives into the creative process”. Like it's a staircase. Like it leads somewhere. Like if you suffer correctly, long enough, with the right aesthetic of decay, something divine will eventually tap you on the shoulder and whisper: now you are worthy of transcendence. So eventually, I stay there, cooking in the lie, like really marinating in it like some sort of holy rot, telling myself this is the ritual, this is the necessary decay before the bloom, yeah, yeah, the artist must suffer, must wander, must disintegrate a little every morning before coffee even touches the bloodstream, before the world starts knocking, if it ever knocks, and I keep repeating it like a broken sermon: there is a process, there is a process, there has to be a process, because without it, what am I doing? Just laying here frying my retinas in borrowed sunlight like an idiot with too many thoughts and no spine to stand them up.

And I start stacking it, fast now, obsessive, like if I don't keep talking, I'll fall through, thinking maybe the greats (whatever that means) felt this too. Maybe they lay there like this, half-mad, half-divine, waiting for the current to hit, the big electric YES that runs through the bones and suddenly everything aligns, every failure justified, every empty morning redeemed, like suffering is just some entrance fee you pay at the door of transcendence, like you hand over your anxiety, your loneliness, your goddamn useless days and they stamp your wrist and say okay kid, now you're allowed to feel something real.

But nothing comes.

Just more thinking, faster now, chewing itself: maybe not enough suffering, maybe I'm too soft, maybe I haven't gone far enough into the gutter of my own mind, maybe I need to break something, lose something, love harder, fall harder, ruin myself properly so the art has somewhere to crawl out from. Things get ugly when I start romanticizing the wreckage before it even happens, pre-packaging my own collapse like content, like material, like oh yes this will look good later in a text, this pain will photograph well, this confusion will sound profound if I just let it rot a little longer.

So I start imagining it, already halfway there, already narrating it before it happens: I'm walking into some abandoned gallery corridor, long and narrow, steps echoing like off a throat that forgot how to speak, bricks exposed and crumbling, the floor uneven, gritty under my shoes, and the air thick with that specific kind of neglect (reminiscing the old prisons), dust, smoke, something burnt, something other lingering in the air. There are cigarettes everywhere, twelve of them maybe, burning slowly on the edges of windowsills or crushed into corners, thin lines of smoke curling up like tired prayers, and I breathe it in like it's necessary, like I'm feeding something in me that refuses to wake up otherwise. And I tell myself: this is it, this is where it starts, this is where the art comes from, from being there, from absorbing it, from letting the unfamiliar scrape against me until something sparks. I watch myself watching space, already framing it, already translating it into images, into something I can later say transformed me. The adrenaline kicks in from the idea that I'm inside it, that I've entered the scene and I'm no longer the static body in bed but a moving thing, a perceiving thing, alive in the presence of something "decaying” beautifully.

But even there, I'm still consuming.

I try to photograph memories before they happen. To construct moments instead of living them. And in this process, I become both the observer and the imposter, staging my own life as if I'm already nostalgic for it. As if the present isn't enough unless it's filtered through (an unknown) loss. And maybe that's the mediocrity no one talks about. Not lack of vision. Not failure. But this constant, low-grade disconnection from experience itself.

This inability to arrive.

And the loop doesn't break, it just relocates.

Same hunger, same lie dressed differently.

NEWNEWNEWNEWNEW

I woke up mediocre again, an unfinished meat sack with a human-trashed, burned-out face, skin sagging like wet cardboard, eyes crusted in yesterday's defeat, thoughts leaking like cheap black ink from a slashed vein, staining every goddamn thing I try to grab, hold, fucking control.

Forgot I exist.

I can mock the myth of the artist and still pose inside it. I can laugh at spirituality and still wait for the divine impulse. I can despise productivity and still measure the day by what I make. I can call the gallery world rotten and still want someone in that rotten room to ask what I’m working on.

There is no clean outside.

Not from capitalism.
Not from art.
Not from ego.
Not from the little spiritual theatre of becoming “more human”.

Even the wish to be free has learned the language of the trap.